


On Trees and Birds and Fire

by greenurr



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Non-Famous, Angst, Frottage, M/M, Porn with Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-23
Updated: 2015-06-23
Packaged: 2018-04-05 20:29:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4193820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenurr/pseuds/greenurr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What are you going to be doing,” Louis says, dipping his hand to rub against Zayn’s stomach. “You know, once we graduate?”</p><p> <em>or</em></p><p>Zayn and Louis are growing up, and neither one are happy about it. A non-famous high school AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Trees and Birds and Fire

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from the song "On Trees and Birds and Fire" by I Am Oak.
> 
> This is my first fic that I've ever written in my life, so that's exciting! I wrote the first section about 6 months ago before Zayn had left the band, but because it's a non-famous high school AU I don't suppose it makes much difference. Enjoy!

Zayn wakes up to someone tapping on his window. He knows it’s a person, and not the old dead tree that his dad keeps saying they’re going to cut down one day, because it’s accompanied by “Zayn! Zayn!” hissed through chittering teeth.

Zayn groans and levers himself up, sitting heavily on the edge of the bed to rub his hands over his face. He looks at the alarm clock on his bedside table. 3:42 AM. He’s been asleep for an hour, maybe a little bit less. When he walks across the room, the wood floor is cold on his bare feet. Louis is perched in the branches of the tree, shivering.

“Babes, why aren’t you wearing a coat?” Zayn shoves open the window just enough to get Louis through.

“It’s just across the fence,” says Louis, shivering. “Thank god Yaser hasn’t cut down that fucking tree, huh?”

Zayn likes the tree. It got struck by lightening in a storm earlier this year, got split in two nearly down to the roots, but before then Louis and he had had a treehouse in the branches. The tree had bloomed in the spring, small white flowers that they would pick, put in their sisters’ hair, leave for their mums on their kitchen counters. It was dead now, though, and his dad said that if there was another storm it might fall on the house, so it had to go.

“Why are you here, mate?” asks Zayn.

“What, you’re not happy to see my face?” asks Louis, hopping around on one foot, taking off his shoes. He sets his foot down and sighs. “The twins have been screaming all night, I couldn’t sleep.”

“Which pair?”

“Funny,” says Louis.

“Take off your pants before you get in bed,” says Zayn, climbing back in, facing the wall. He can hear Louis unzip his jeans, the slump of them falling to the floor, the crack of Louis’ back as he stretches. The mattress squeaks as Louis slides in behind Zayn, spooning him, hand immediately going to cup his pec, thumb sliding gently across his nipple.

“You know I’m not a girl, right?” asks Zayn.

Louis snorts. “Sorry, habit.” He doesn’t move his hand. Zayn doesn’t ask him to.

Zayn is almost falling asleep when Louis says his name.

“Hmm?” Zayn asks, eyes still closed.

“What are you going to be doing,” Louis says, dipping his hand to rub against Zayn’s stomach. “You know, once we graduate?”

Zayn’s eyes pop open. They don’t talk about this, just like they don’t talk about Louis’ father; about what they do sometimes, in Zayn’s bed after school or when Louis sneaks in here in the dark, how it didn’t stop, even now that Louis is dating Eleanor, that Zayn is dating Perrie; about the acceptance letter to the Royal College of Art that’s been sitting on Zayn’s desk since November that Zayn knows Louis has seen because he left it out there so Louis would see it.

They can talk about everything, but that doesn’t mean that they have to. That they want to. 

“What are you going to be doing?” Zayn asks.

“Keep working at Toys-R-Us, unless I get fired.” Louis laughs. Zayn does too, softly. “Full-time instead of part-time, I guess. Stay with Mum. Help with the girls and Ernest. Faff around on the weekends.”

“Forever?” Zayn asks, and immediately regrets it. Up until this point, Louis has been quiet, tired. He can feel Louis gaze sharpen behind him, even without looking at him. He can hear his jaw clench.

“Well, unless you can whirl me away to your palace on a mountain overlooking the sea where I can live worry free until the rest of my days, Zayn. Can you?”

“No,” Zayn says. He’s flushed, like he always is when someone is angry with him, especially Louis. It doesn’t happen often, and he isn’t used to it.

“Then yes, forever,” says Louis, and his voice isn’t angry anymore. He sounds like he did when he was eleven and had thrown a rock at a bird to try to get it to move, accidentally striking it in the head and killing it, like he did on the walk home after they got their A levels back, like he knows something is wrong but isn’t willing to talk about it.

“Then I’ll stay here, too,” says Zayn. 

“Zayn,” Louis breathes.

“I will,” says Zayn. “I’ll keep working at the art shop in town, help you with the girls. We’ll be together, it’ll be ace.”

“I don’t-” starts Louis.

“Go to sleep.” Zayn strokes an hand up and down Louis’ arm. “Go to sleep, we’ll talk about it in the morning.”

“Alright,” Louis says, burying his head in the back of Zayn’s neck. He knows Louis is only letting this go because it’s late, because he’s tired. If it were daytime, they’d be screaming at each other by now.

“Alright,” Zayn says, and shuts his eyes.

Zayn can hear Louis’ low, deep sigh, feel his breath against his back. The old tree outside sways, tapping against the window.

 

* * *

 

 Louis wakes up slow. He isn’t confused. Waking up in Zayn’s bed is familiar as waking up in his own, the smell of Axe and his own cheap shampoo supplanted by Zayn’s sweat and the heady spice mix that Trish puts on Zayn’s favorite chicken. Zayn eats it up in bed, always, the night after she serves it, taking the leftovers up to his bed in the middle of the night and eating it cold out of the container in the dark. He’s spilled so much on the mattress the whole room smells faintly of cumin and tumeric. No one else minds, really—nobody else really likes it. Zayn’s always had strange taste.

Zayn isn’t awake yet. Louis has to piss.

He slips out of bed carefully. The weak winter light trickling through the bathroom window makes Louis’ hands holding his prick over the toilet look like something Zayn might draw, the shadows of his hands like holy things. Louis flushes the toilet with his toes, runs his hands under the water, and they are just hands once again.

Before he can leave, a bird outside the clear bathroom window catches his attention. The Malik’s wide upstairs bathroom window is not opaque, and is without blinds, something that horrors and mortifies Zayn.

“What if someone looks in the window while I’m naked?” he asked once, when it came up, watching reality telly with Louis in their pajamas in the middle of the afternoon.

“Nobody cares, Zayn,” said Doniya, passing through on her way to go do something with the friends she had. Louis wasn’t sure if she meant that no one cared to look at Zayn’s body, or no one cared about what he was saying. Louis couldn’t imagine either one.

The bird is small and brown, ruffling it’s feathers in little bursts on the tree branch outside. Heat rises in Louis’ face—anger? Humiliation? He can’t tell. Sometimes his body reacts before his mind can catch up, trembling hands and shortness of breath, experiencing the symptoms before he can track down the cause.

He remembers, then, a bird like that, lying on the ground, eyes closed and little legs not like they were supposed to be.

Louis and Zayn had been walking back from secondary school when they had seen the bird, pecking at the slip of dirt in a crack in the sidewalk.

“Get out of the way, bird,” said Louis. It had been a bad day. He couldn’t remember why, now, but it had been a bad day.

“Leave it alone, Lou,” said Zayn, wearily. “It’ll fly away when we get too close.”

“We’re already close,” said Louis, and scooped up a rock to get the bird moving. He threw too hard though, and a little too well, and the stone hit the bird on the head. The bird fell over and didn’t get up.

“Oh, no,” whispered Zayn. Louis remembered everything growing quiet, like all the other birds had seen what he had done and stopped singing. Zayn brought a hand up to his mouth. When Yaser took Zayn and Louis to go fishing, one time, Zayn had made them throw all of the fish back, even the biggest catch of the day. He didn’t like to see things hurt, he’d said, let alone die.

“Is it dead?” asked Louis, hoping that Zayn would say no.

“I don’t know. You go check.”

“I don’t want to check.”

“You’re the one who threw the stone, Louis.”

It was hard to argue with that.

Louis walked to the side of the road and picked up a stick. He hoped that when he turned around the bird would be up and hopping again, or even better yet, it would have flown away. But when he found a twig and turned back around, the bird was still laying there, the stone near its head. Louis poked it.

“She’s dead,” he said, and all of the sudden he was sure the bird was a she, he was sure she had some babies all alone in their nest, waiting for their mother to come back. And then they’d die too, and what did that make him?

“We can’t just… leave her here.” He looked at Zayn, willing him to understand. All of the sudden it was crucial that Zayn understand, that he got what Louis couldn’t tell him.

“We’ll need to pick her up, then.”

“I don’t want to use my hands.”

“We could kick her along in front of us?”

“Zayn.”

“I’m only trying to be helpful. Here,” Zayn said, picking a piece of paper out from his backpack, “Here, you sort of scrape her with your stick onto this paper—that’s it.” The piece of paper was an old homework assignment. The bird’s beak neatly pointed at the 100% at the top of Zayn’s page.

They had buried the bird in the park nearby. Afterwards Louis had stood there for a while, before turning home. They never really talked about it again, but sometimes Louis wonders if Zayn looks at him and sees the kid who killed that bird.

The bird outside the bathroom window now is the same kind of bird as the one Louis threw the stone at. He wonders if she’s related to the dead one. Maybe she’s one of the babies of the original mama. Maybe there are just a lot of those kinds of birds in this neighborhood.

The bird looks at him through the bathroom window, pecks at the branch a bit, and flies away. Louis knows that if this were a painting, that bird would mean something. Freedom, maybe. Letting something go, probably.

Zayn would be able to explain it. Louis doesn’t want to ask him.

 

* * *

 

 Zayn wakes up when Louis slips back into bed. It’s so hot, under the covers. Zayn likes to sleep hot, likes to wake up with sweat under his armpits, a little bit thirsty. Likes the weight of the blankets surrounding him.

“Good morning,” he whispers to Louis, and kisses him gently. It’s so much easier at times like this, with his eyes still closed from sleep, or in the dark, or under the covers after school. He’s not sure they could do this while they looked at each other. He’s not sure what that would change.

Louis kisses back, softly, slowly, raising his hand to rest it against the side of Zayn’s neck. It’s cold, and slightly wet. He was in the bathroom, then.

He can hear his mother getting up as they kiss, walking down to the kitchen and setting a pan on a stove.

Louis breathes out slowly through his nose, an unconscious signal that Zayn knows means he’s starting to get into it, starting to get hard. Zayn brings their hips close together and he can feel Louis through his underwear, half hard and searing. It’s so, so hot under the blankets. He pulls Louis on top of him and grabs at the comforter until it’s over Louis’ head. He wants this heat, Louis’ stale breath and comforting weight, the air getting harder to breathe by the second.

They push their underwear to the bottom of the bed, lost in the sheets, and Louis braces himself above Zayn, grinds down into his hip, the soft skin of his belly, his happy trail, cock fully hard now. Zayn brings his hand to the back of Louis’ neck as Louis’ cock lines up with his, rubbing between their bellies.

“Oh,” Zayn says, like he’s surprised. Louis hums back, grinding down, breath hot on Zayn’s neck.

“Oh,” says Zayn, “this is-” _nice_ , he wants to say. Just being with Louis, hot, under the blankets. Nice doesn’t seem like enough though, for Louis lapping at his neck, gently, not leaving any hickeys; not enough for their combined slick on their bellies; not enough for their legs and feet tangled together in with the sheets. Zayn can feel sweat at his lower back, behind his knees.

“Wait,” Louis says, “wait,” and flips the blankets over, grabs a handful of lotion off the bedside table and slicks it over their cocks, bringing them together in his hand. Louis’ hand is small and tight around their cocks, and the two of them shift their hips together restlessly, losing any sort of rhythm. Zayn can feel his thighs trembling, knows Louis is close from the panting in his ear.

Louis comes first, letting out little closed mouthed moans as he spills onto Zayn’s stomach, uses his own come to slide his hand up and down Zayn’s cock until Zayn comes too, pressing his face into the little bit of chest hair Louis’ started to grow at his sternum.

It’s hot when Louis presses down onto him, and sticky. Zayn doesn’t mind, though. Zayn knows they’re going to have to talk when they get out of bed, talk about school and work, about futures. He doesn’t want to, though, and in the swampy mess between his sheets, he knows that Louis won’t press.

“That was-” Zayn says, again, and doesn’t know how to describe it, again. Doesn’t know how to describe Louis, what he is, what they are. His mom had described he and Louis once as a banked fire, sometimes flaring up but always settling back into the comfortable, hot red glowing of coals. Ready to get hot again whenever needed.

 _Fires can go out_ , he thinks.

He feels hot at the back of his throat, and the pit of his stomach burns a little. _This isn’t the last time_ , he tells himself, _not even close_.

It is the first time, though, that he’s considered there might be a last time.


End file.
